Here is a quiet test of how healthy a firm really is. One person goes on holiday for a week. What happens to their work while they are gone?
In a lot of firms, the honest answer is: it stops. Because everything that person was doing lived in their email, or their head, or a chat thread nobody else was on. The moment they log off, the rest of the team is left asking what is being worked on, how far along it is, and what happens next. And the person on holiday is not really on holiday at all, because they know they are the only one who can find anything.
That is not a people problem. It is a workflow problem. And it is one of the simplest, highest-value things a firm can fix.
What happens when the one person who knows everything logs off?
Picture a real situation. A firm brings in outside help but insists all communication runs through one team member’s email. It works, more or less, until that person goes on vacation. Suddenly nobody can answer basic questions. What is being done? Who is working on it? How far along is it? The work grinds to a halt, not because anyone is incapable, but because the only map of it was in one inbox that is now dark for a week.
Now picture the opposite. A firm owner takes his first real vacation in five years, with his wife, and comes back to find everything done. His actual words of thanks were on behalf of his wife, because for once he was genuinely present with her. The difference was not that his team suddenly got better. It was that the work was visible, assigned, and moving without him, because he had built it that way beforehand.
Same week, two firms. One cannot survive a single person taking leave. The other lets the owner disappear for a fortnight. The only difference is whether the work lives in a system or in a person.
Is your workflow a tool, or expensive wallpaper?
Here is the uncomfortable part. Plenty of firms that “have” a workflow are getting almost nothing from it.
The classic version: a firm has a cloud workflow tool, cutting-edge, paid for, and when you actually look inside, nothing is moving in it. As one person put it, “it’s like looking at a wall.” The reason is almost always the same, they are not using status points. The tool has become a glorified contact list: here is the client, here is the address, here is the tax ID, and nothing else. No sense of whether a job is in prep, in review, waiting on the client, or done.
A workflow with no statuses is not a workflow. It is a screensaver you are paying a licence for. If the only way to find out where a job stands is still to walk down the hall and ask, the tool is not doing the one job it exists to do.
Why does a tax tool fail at the rest of the work?
There is a specific trap worth naming, because so many firms fall into it. They set up a workflow tool that was built for tax, and then try to run everything else through it.
Tax work is linear. Do the return, move it on, next one. Client accounting and advisory work is nothing like that. It is ongoing, daily and weekly and monthly and quarterly, never finished, with priorities and statuses that shift constantly because the client’s business shifts constantly. A tool designed to push a return down a line cannot handle work that loops back on itself every day. Forcing it to is a large part of why firms feel their workflow “isn’t quite doing it” for them. It was never built for the work they are asking of it.
What does chaos actually cost, in a single evening?
The absence of a real workflow does not just slow things down. It makes people make bad decisions under pressure.
Here is how it plays out. Late in the evening, a high-priority job comes in, dropped into a chat with no owner assigned. A team member spots it at the end of the day, feels the pressure, and stays late to force it out rather than leave a client waiting. Rushed and tired, they skip the review. The work goes out late and with mistakes. Now it is late and wrong, from someone who was trying to do the right thing.
Nobody did that on purpose. Crisis makes people choose badly, and a firm without a way to triage runs on crisis. Every ping feels urgent, every email at nine at night feels like it needs an answer now, and the team lives in a game of whack-a-mole. The cost is not just the redone work. It is people who never get to switch off.
How does a workflow give you breathing room?
The fix is not heroics. It is triage, and a workflow is what makes triage possible.
When work lands in the workflow instead of an inbox, something calming happens. A job that arrives at nine at night is captured, sitting safely in the system, and it will be picked up in the morning by whoever owns it. You do not have to answer it now. You can have your coffee first. The noise that used to feel like a constant emergency becomes background, white noise you look at when you are ready, rather than a series of fires.
That is the real product of a good workflow: not efficiency, breathing room. The ability to receive something and decide, calmly, that it can wait until tomorrow, because you can see it is captured and nothing is falling through.
Why this is really about keeping your people
There is a bigger reason to care, and it is not productivity. It is that people are done working in firms that cannot let them breathe.
The old story is that younger people “won’t work.” That is not it. They will work. They just will not sign up for a job where they cannot take a real holiday, cannot log off at night, and carry the constant low hum of being the only one who knows where things are. Life is short. A firm where the work is visible and shared is a firm where people can actually leave, get sick, care for their family, and come back to find things still moving. That is what makes somewhere worth working, and it is increasingly what makes somewhere able to hire at all.
None of this requires a huge project. You may already have a workflow tool sitting inside a subscription you pay for. Even simple repeatable tasks beat work living in someone’s head. The point is to start, so that work stops living in one person’s head and starts living somewhere the whole team can see.
If it would help to have someone help you set it up so you can step away without the firm grinding to a halt, that is a conversation we have with firms all the time, and the kind of thing a good back-office team does every day.
For more on building a better accounting practice, MoneyPenny hosts Beyond Numbers, a podcast of practical conversations on capacity, workflow, pricing, technology and the realities of running a firm. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.
